Native Mobile Apps Part 1

It means that when I’m sit­ting on the floor with my son play­ing with lego, I’m wear­ing glass­es.

I hate my glass­es.

I mean, I look great (I prob­a­bly didn’t need to say that) but I freak­ing hate hav­ing some­thing on my face.

The prob­lem is that I need them to read my phone too. And I’m always on my phone, so I have to keep my glass­es handy (and when I don’t, I have even more trou­ble see­ing at the end of the day).

What does this have to do with mobile apps?

I Remember

I remem­ber when Apple first had a sys­tem font pref­er­ence that worked across apps. Before then, using a Black­ber­ry or Win­dows Mobile, I remem­ber hav­ing to change the font set­ting for each app indi­vid­u­al­ly (if the app sup­port­ed one). It was awk­ward at best. Font sizes between apps were incon­sis­tent dri­ving the OCD (fig­u­ra­tive, not diag­nos­ti­cal­ly lit­er­al) part of me insane.

I remem­ber the relief that I could go to one set­ting on the iPhone and nev­er have to think about it again.

The Thing

Here’s the thing.

I now have the sys­tem font set to the high­est size. It works great, most­ly. How­ev­er…

Respon­sive apps either can’t, can’t eas­i­ly, or have devel­op­ers that don’t care to imple­ment the sys­tem font set­ting in their apps. I could call out banks, hos­pi­tals, and even Coin­Mar­ket­Cap (where I track my cryp­to port­fo­lio dai­ly) and Telegram (where I learn more about Cryp­to) that don’t sup­port the sys­tem font.

It dri­ves me insane when peo­ple don’t accept that their crap­py respon­sive apps are crap­py. I under­stand why they have to be some­times done (some apps just aren’t that impor­tant)… but that’s not the case with the ones I’m most­ly using.

A Better Discussion

I’m not always the smartest guy on these things… so I could be wrong as to the why’s, but I’m not wrong as to the trend, or the rea­son why com­pa­nies aren’t writ­ing native apps (they’re much more expen­sive to cre­ate and require skills spe­cif­ic to the task, rather than gen­er­al pur­pose web skills, among oth­er rea­sons).

If you want to hear a great dis­cus­sion on the sys­tem font fea­ture and imple­men­ta­tion, lis­ten to this pod­cast. The link should take you to a spe­cif­ic moment in time (about 1 hour 10 min­utes into the pod­cast). It’s John Gruber’s pod­cast The Talk Show with Jim Dal­rym­ple. I high­ly rec­om­mend lis­ten­ing, both for con­tent as well as pro­duc­tion val­ue. If I ever do a pod­cast, this one is the for­mat I’d like to copy. John starts each episode mid-thought. Amaz­ing.

More to Come

I have a lot to write about native vs. non-native apps (much of it in inter­nal CA emails or my blog draft fold­er), which is why I’ve titled this one part 1. It’s an essen­tial top­ic for B2B peo­ple to under­stand because a native app point of view is a con­tro­ver­sial idea in the cir­cles I run in.

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David

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